Driving Forces for an Indian I.T. Professional

Wonder, what the driving forces are for an I.T. professional. Okay, I give you choices and the choices are:

1. Zeal to learn and innovate something technical
2. Delight of contributing to society in a high-tech fashion
3. Hope to develop personally being in a professional environment
4. Urge to follow footprints of software tycoons like Prem Ji (Wipro), Narayan Murthi (Infosys), or even, Bill gates
5. Earn a handsome salary to enjoy lavish life

I believe, the most honest answer is number 5^th. Do you agree? If yes, topic doesn’t deserve to be discussed any further.

In all the other cases, I’ve further questions, the first question is:

• Are we getting enough opportunities to create something innovative?

I don’t think when we are a force of more than 0.16 Million alike I.T. professionals in just top four companies (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL) of India, we all can get equal opportunities for developing something as a result of hardcore R&D.

• Can the CMM certified companies survive without having many of us filling benches?

I again don’t think it’s possible. The solutions-based companies have got to prove before the client(s) that any software-crisis condition can be defied with such large a force of techies (yes, so called techies.)

• Aren’t we ignorant and careless about catching up on the new things including technologies, profit-making and/or useful software products? Have all of us ever applied our own mind to the betterment of the existing and working systems?

My opinion here may not be general, but in my view, Yes, We are that ignorant! That’s the reason why not many Indian products like Tally, orderbox, etc. are heard of, so often.

• Are all the managers able to handle the real techies?

Again NO! The managers, who are into HR don’t possess technical skills to manage techies, and the managers, who are technical or functional either don’t choose to care or cannot care about individualism of every potential subordinate. This even helps the growing spirit fade off inside real techies’ minds and finally makes them yet another trail-follower.

The ultimately what I conclude myself is that we don’t allow ourselves to do anything better for ourselves, except in terms of money-making. What all we allowed to do and set up our minds to do, is just money-making and earning bread and butter.

I too believe that everyone cannot be an innovator, no one is an Einstein. However, if this is what everyone agrees to, I advocate not to just run after what’s hot in the market (like I.T. in the current scenario), rather allow ourselves do some efforts to make our likings hot in the market.

GridMove: Boost Up Your Productivy With Windows

I have seen people struggling with the multiple open windows, especially when all or more than one windows are visually important. For example, consider yourself as a graphic designer who has just seen a catchy design on a Website and wants to use the inspiration with your own bit of creativity in your own work. Being a designer in this cheap-hardware era, you are likely to have a 19" or 21" monitor. Of course, it is definitely troublesome for you to keep switching windows from browser to Photoshop to your favourite word processor.

The easier solution is to snap all or important windows to fit into that huge desktop area and do not spend those annoying milliseconds just clicking the windows away and moving back onto them. There are number of tools available for allowing you to do it, GridMove being my favourite amongst all. The software is very handy if you care about productivity and are annoyed at the things which are there but not in their optimum forms.

With all the advantages of this windows management systems available, you can multiply your productivity making use of the customizability it offers. It allows you to define hotkeys and change the UI as you desire. Virtually all the features of the application are at your fingertips without having to move your hands away from your keyboard to the mouse, thanks to the full keyboard support it provides. The cherry on top is the exhaustive and comprehensive help that comes bundled with the application, which makes this software a worthwhile addition to your toolkit of productivity-centric nifty tools.

P2P Could Be Good At It!

Yesterday was a record download day for Firefox 3. Of course, it exactly was how it was expected. The Firefox3 browser seems to be much faster in user experience. However, there seem to be few problems, such as, many of the old Firefox extensions seem not to work. I simply see it as a problem due to its infant stage when the extension developers haven't still got time to make their products forward-compatible :P

...Umm..Not going into further problems, it's after all a sweet release, except in the fact that wait time for the FireFox3 download seems to be real pain. Although, for obvious reasons it is; the servers despite of (hopefully) being pretty good at load-balancing cannot serve entire world at one time.

I happened to think of making formal use of P2P (Peer-to-peer) sharing for taking the load off the servers hosting the installers. As widely known, the P2P sharing and related things are better known, rather infamous for allowing illegal sharing of copyright material, such as music, video, various sorts of artistic stuff and even, pirated software.

What occurred to me was, if the developer and users communities of various products (especially open-source considering the less feasibility for commercial apps) join hands with the project (or product) owners to help reduce the issue of availability, it may actually come true, and thus, it might be a better and formalized way of performing launches where high demand is expected.

Windows Embedded NavReady 2009 launched as a boon to PND OEMs

Whenever Microsoft launches a platform, it's always a big event. Even this time, when they have launched, Windows Embedded NavReady 2009, they boast of the utilities the users-on-the-move can avail.

The show begins with an announcement of news, Microsoft Introduces First Embedded Operating System Optimized Specifically for Portable Navigation Device (PND) Manufacturers, yesterday, June 16th 2008. As they say, the futuristic platform boasts of having number of features that enable OEMs to make Microsoft again their favourite choice producing their next-gen handheld navigation devices.

Of course, the market opportunities for such an operating system do look bright, and therefore, it is being conceived as a brilliant and useful product. The OEMs into manufacturing of Portable Navigations Devices (PND) can straight way start building on top of the platform. As Microsoft Corp. announce the list of the product features, they really sound impressive, being capable of making use of the most widely used wireless connectivity technologies, including, Live Search, Bluetooth (and almost all useful Bluetooth utilities), user-friendliness on the move with MSN Direct, and Window SideShow functionality.

It seems to make life easier for the private labeled manufacturers of PNDs. However, at the same time it is going to increase the user base of MSN, remember, Microsoft's search engine, that has always been struggling in the competitive battle of the search providers on the Web.

Official Google Blog: Google India Women in Engineering Award 2008

Google India Women in Engineering Award 2008

An initiative by Google, to encourage Indian women to show off their I.T. skills. Google announces an award, Google India Women in Engineering Award, for the Indian women who are still an aspirants to be full-time into I.T. The eligibility criteria is also not a show stopper for academically excellent computer science students, though it rules out many applications.

Well, this is definitely a brilliantly planned way by Google to publicize themselves as great company to work with. Also, this is a step that will enrich Google's HR database of quality profiles and everyone who is into resourcing, knows that it's worth it.


Information Source: Official Google Blog: Google India Women in Engineering Award 2008

Keyboard Shortcuts: More Than Just yet-another-feature (GMail)

I always loved using shortcuts while working with various desktop UIs. Of course, need for the same was felt while working on Web sites and Web applications too. This requirement was addressed by many leading players in the Webosphere, Google being one of them. However, even with a useful feature such as, shortcuts, there are troubles. Keyboard shortcuts are very useful and increase the work efficiency by a profound degree UNLESS you need not remember them.
Working with different user interfaces, remembering different shortcuts for each one becomes a real hassle. As a result, you end up not utilizing this extra-ordinary feature. As a solution to this problem, various UIs help the user remember the shortcuts by:

• Showing the quick tips : which are sometimes annoying too, but sometimes, very useful.
• Mentioning the shortcuts (keyboard equivalanet) next to the commands/links/buttons, or relevant places in the UI : which is not always possible because many commands as appearing on the UI don't have enough UI space to accommodate a shortcut text.
• Displaying a quick map of keyboard shortcuts: The map of keyboard shortcuts is just one shortcut away, which one can easily remember. An ideal example of this approach can be seen on GMail. It is definitely done brilliantly, the Google way. You can view the following screenshot to view how useful this approach can be:

You can view this shortcut-keystroke map by pressing, SHIFT+?, and then you can make it disappear and return to your original view by simply clicking anywhere outside the appearing chart of shortcuts and keystroke combinations.

This unconventional way of helping the users exploit this less-used yet very useful feature, Keyboard shortcuts, is definitely worth trying out. And, who knows how efficiently this improves your working experience with GMail.

Information source:
Official Gmail Blog: '?' answers your shortcut questions

Official Gmail Blog: Create personal mailing lists through contact manager

Google Mailing Lists: New feature in GMail.

Google again..adds another useful feature to its one of the most widely used products, GMail. Remember those e-mails that were sent out to everybody in a particular department about an announcement, in your last organization? Of course, that is done using Mailing lists. E-mail addresses of all the relevant recipients are added to a mailing list and then, you never need to worry about who hasn't received an important message.

Gmail now supports customizable mailing lists, to which you can add e-mail addresses from the list of your GMail contacts. Once you add your contacts to mailing lists, you are ready to send a common message to all contacts in your mailing list. All you need to do is, entering the name of that group to the To field while composing an e-mail to be sent to the mailing list.
This saves you the hassle of picking each one of the intended recipients before sending mails. Also, this automatically eleminates the possibility of not adding some e-mail addresses while sending messages.

Mailing lists can be used for various personal and professional purposes. For example, you can send invitations for your evening parties to all invitees without missing anyone. Or, you can send quick and easy update about the change of your contact number to all the important people. Well, there is an endless list of applications of mailing lists to your daily lives. So, it's here for you to check out.

You can find the detailed instructions on, how to create a mailing list in GMail from Official Gmail Blog: Create personal mailing lists through contact manager

Handling Smarties e.g. Hackers in Your Surroundings

Being part of a forum meant of people deeply interested in hacking, I happened to observe a number of behavior patterns that distinguish hackers from rest of us. Rather, I should say, that differ smarties from rest of the people.
A few of them were, using (almost incomprehensible to rest) slang phrases for virtually everything, writing everything so technically complex that leaves you bare-handed, and a rage to have achieved something out of the box. Not to be taken otherwise, the veterans out there typically tend to give direct solutions to problem rather than making friends with people for getting nothing in return. However, sometimes the style of direct replies leave the rest off guard. My suggestion is to not let oneself feel offended, rather try to gain trust not by acting warm, by showing off your skills, by helping the rest the way you received help. This is a kind of behaviour one needs to learn before getting across those smarties. The ways of learning, in the first place, requires you to know, how and when to put yourself forth asking questions. You should learn, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way before you collect courage to kick-ass those self-proclaimed geniuses.

Google Finance: the latest buzz from Google

Google now penetrates into an area till now touched by various companies at local levels most prominently. That area is finance and portfolio management. The best part again like all the other google products is their reliance on "Majesty Of Simplicity."

As default options you can view daily statistics of growth and decline of various international market indexes viz. Nasdaq, Dow, S&P 500, NYSE on the Google Finance Page. They have not refrained from displaying presumably their favourite feature i.e. news and headlines but now limited to financial domain only. These headlines keep on getting updated with the global business news fed from all the leading newslines across all over the world.
You can even use Google Finance for your book keeping needs, I mean for portfolio management, seems a little trivial to me, but again the majesty of simplicity.

Google finance keeps you updated about all the news it assumes required, for the stocks you've added in your portfolio. It displays statistics chart, financial stats at the moment, Company Facts, Company Summary, and Management Details related to your selected stocks. It also displays the blogs, data about other related companies and more relevant links related to the stocks of your choice.

Another very interesting tool by google, falling perfectly inline with their leading trail of products. Just check it out...

Mumbai, Home to Helpless Talents

History has witnessed an everlasting trail of people coming to Mumbai in hopes of a bright future, falling perfectly inline with what Mumbai has been always known for. As always enticing outsiders, Mumbai is viewed as a place where people come hungry but don't sleep hungry.
Continueing along the similar lines, I recently met many of the similar people coming from remote areas of U.P., Bihar, Haryana, A.P., Tamilnadu, and virtually all states in India.
The typical categories of jobs these people were found doing were:

• Rickshaw & Taxi Driving(Most of the rickshaw and taxi drivers in Mumbai are U.P. and Bihar people)
• Paanwalas
• Doodhwalas
• Security Guards

.... and many more.
To my surprize, many of these guys came Mumbai in hopes of seeing their talents flourish, but with no penny in pockets. I don't know whether to call it unfortunate or lucky, they started earning their livelihoods fearing the slappings of time and feeling hunger. The jobs that gave them their first bucks of living were unfortunately not as they were supposed to be; they were not utilizing their talented sides. Yes, the talented sides of them were really bright but covered by mist of helplessness, hunger. One of the security guards at my office had been a draftsman a long ago and the man at coffee machine is an aspirant for becoming a graphic designer. His drawings of cartoons and memory-based sketches really display a nice treat to eyes and aesthetic senses.

How to help them meet their goals, is something which requires a great thought from everyone well-to-do.
As they say, "a good live cannot blossom in an environment of want and poverty."

...Shall goodwill ever be secure?

"From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me –
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring...
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
...Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars."

excerpt

Taken from a chinese author's collection, the poem really picks me to the state where I need to realize if the goodwill ever be secure.

An employer emplyed a person with a high I.Q. level, but desperate to get a job. Employer traded on his desperation of unemployment. Both being committed to each others' needs kept working together living a harmonious relationship. Despite their employer-employee relationship (Master-Slave in worse words), they played, enjoyed, had picnics, and worked together towards the money-making of employer.
The employee one day decided to get seperated as he was now better off than ever and had now learned how one can get what he deserves. Although not feeling so happy at the thought, he decided to depart gracefully from his employer. He was getting employment from many others with far higher prospects of flying high. He now wanted to live up to his expectations from himself.
Employer on the other hand was stunned to have this news heard and tried to placate him verbally and monetarily as well. The employer was also in a way better financial condition than ever, by now. Fearing that the employee would now certainly leave his employment, he says, "Dude, do you really think you can quit without my consent? No, You can't! I've signature of yours on a paper, which says that you cannot quit within this particular tenure on any condition or any cost."
Now the ball is in employee's court. He finds himself dumbfounded to remember his days of need, because of which he signed that document without giving a serious thought. He has to decide, what to do now. Should he murder his relationship with his employer and sacrifice his certificate of that employment & experience, or he should follow what his employer says, killing his own ambitions and sacrificing these new opportunities just to keep sanctity of his relations and papers?

Friends, ball is in fact in your court now...send your comments please.

Don't Fake It Here, It's Your Job

How many of you have faked the smallest (yes, considering it forgivable) details in your resume. Oh, don't feel offended, I just knew that it's a bitter reality that many of us do without thinking it a thing that may deserve a thought. If seen in a Cause-and-Effect scenario, at the Cause level, there are several things that might or might not really result into desirable or undesirable effects. In the hopes of good result and thinking our employers chucking the minute lies in our profiles, we falsify very small and very few things like:

• Marks in qualification (% or CGPA)


• Date of Joining at previous organization


• Projects undertaken


• Functional and technical expertise (in some cases)


• Total experience (Usually increased to multiples of a year as in, 10-11 months of experience written as one year)


• Cause of resignation at previous employer(s)


• Names of previous employer(s)


• Reason to join the company (that's one of the most compromised truths)

Now what at the effect level?

That level doesn't feature ever at all many times, backing us up with a false sense of security while performing this kind of misdeeds. But what if this really springs before the people who have hired you? Just think, and let me cite some examples if you felt fainted doing it.
A project manager was shown the way to door coming back happily completing a successful onsite assignments at one of the giant MNC among financial securities firms. Reason was, among his huge experience he had mentioned a local-level small company which never existed on earth. Alas, all this expertise was blamed for virtually no reason at all.
A senior IT consultant was kicked out three months after joining one of the largest software companies when it was known that the B.E. marks he wrote in his resume were not exactly what he secured.

There are several examples before us and many behind the scene (behind the scene, because these bad experiences are not made highlights to keep people at ease with the employer.) In this age of cut-throat competition and easy availability of information you never know when are you going to get exposed. Many firms have started performing a strong and strict background check paying big bucks to third parties (such as detective agencies.) List of such third parties which provide risk consultation in hiring decisions can be found at: http://www.bestbackgroundchecks.com/employment.html

Mind you, if there is something similar in your mind, beware! Otherwise you can also make your company lose your CTC to some verifying trash.

Morons getting intelligent, Thanks Google!
New Role Of Google, the Big B to Morons

Google has well evolved as the Big B to the community of cyber morons after the dissemination of this immensely useful phrase, Google It You Moron (http://googleityoumoron.com.) It's pure fun having heard this phrase every now and then among the colleagues and many of the guys asking silly questions. This phrase is indeed becoming a favorite saying of individuals who consider themselves smarter or just want to tease people asking stupid questions.
As a result, I am witnessing many morons getting smarter and a bit more cautious while asking questions, regardless of the quality of the questions.

Moron as an acknowledgement to their new-found respite, owe thanks to Google, the Big B. At the same time, Google should also pay equal thanks to the creator of site and founder of the phrase, Google It You Moron. This simple phrase must have directed a great deal traffic to google.

Computers hate infinity, I should not...

Whatever seems impossible to perpetrate is flagged as , undefined, by a computer but the same is what humans have always made their jacks. I am referring to Swami Dayananda's comment, "IMPossible, means I M (am) Possible."

What makes us think the infinity the undefined way, a focus to our main goal mitigated by the myriad of our short-term goals. No doubts that these short-term goals are also very important for us to get to the situation of feeling big at small achievements and make the course of life normal. However, this myriad of short-term goals should not be entrapping enough to not let us focus on our main goal.

I was finding myself dumbfounded pondering over the differences between set of my principles and practices during recent days. I took two days of complete leisure for letting my thought process go unceased and finally, I ended up writing and making a clear vision of my principles and to visualize the junction where my practices (owing to my social and person needs) meet my principles. This two-day phenomenon of pondering involved an improvised and self-contrived session of finding and resolving the guilt arising due to inefficiency of mine during previous days. I realized the sources of guilts as a few professional setbacks, few flawed relationships and few inabilities to achieve my short-term goals. As the way out, I allowed myself a very short and strict time limit for finding reasons and surprisingly I got reasons for my these guilts in most of the cases, and for the unresolved, I chose to chuck them up.

This was my way of waving a good-bye to self-originated frustration and self-motivation. As a result of which,

"I don't hate infinity unlike computers. "

Attention Geeks, Bitwise 06 Announced!

Technical freaks, an alarm for you from IIT Kharagpur. Bitwise 06, the annual online programming contest, which has become a grownup among its global counterparts leaving behind age of its infancy merely a few years back.

Bitwise poses a set of virtual problems that are emulated real by the creative themes, the creators of these problems contrive. These virtual problems are supposed to be first reduced to some intelligible software problems and that’s where your programming brains should start working. The objective is not only to have programmatic solutions to these problems; solutions must appear as if they are real work of real brains. They need to be optimized for time and space complexity of algorithms giving rise to them.
As a set convention, Bitwise is held on the second Sunday of month of February each year, and this year 12 February is the date for online trial of your gray cells.
As for the rules, you are provided a limited time span (limited but not less) of around 12 hours on the day of trial, during which you can post up to 10 unique solutions to each problem. The most recent solution to a particular problem will be deemed the final solution to that problem from your side.
For further information, visit:
Bitwise 06 Home
Get informed and enticed, enroll, download the problems, and take a deep breath. Start working out the old problems.
Perhaps you're gonna become the one who gets ranked among the top 50 and among the ones who get their skills explored and exposed to outside world... and who knows who in this material world is looking for a geek like you!

CAT 2005 results from IIMs OUT!

"With end of hopes for many,
Bringing a season to the eyes called, rainy,
While Cheers blasting in the eves
all lush and rustles in the winter leaves..."

... CAT has unveiled its both sides to the test-takers, the IIM aspirants,
making many faces glooming with high hopes zooming while many others sobbing, feeling CAT's fobbing... finally.

Three IIMs, IIM Lucknow, IIM Ahmedabad, and IIM Calcutta today declared the results for CAT 2005 exam, which you can check at the following URLs:

• IIM Calcutta:
• IIM Ahmedabad:
• IIM Lucknow:
• For PG Programme in management:
• For Post-graduate programme in agri-business management

Hold your heart, and click all of the links one after another....

My best wishes with you!

30gigs Free Invitations
30 GB of free e-mail space, security compromised


30Gigs.com is an invitation-only email service which offers a whopping 30 Gigabytes of storage for your email. As a reference, GMail currently offers around 2.5 GB storage.

Unfortunately, 30gigs.com has a poorly implemented registration interface, which can be trivially compromised. Though, it's not so unfortunate for everybody.

Following is the link, through which you can easily get over the need for invitations required for a free 30gigs.com e-mail account:

http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-get-free-30gigscom-email-account-without-invitation/

Check it out guys!

I am waiting for the guys at 30gigs.com to pay attention to their security vulnerabilities, till then ...
... Chill Out!

Google Bombing: The Latest Consequences

I Love Google! Seriously friends, I mean it. But now the belief of mine in google is starting shaking because of an awesome (perhaps, awful) event happening globally right at the time of writing this post. Wanna look at that? Follow the steps in the order they are written here:

1. Open www.google.com (Google, the world’s favorite site.)
2. Type “failure” or “miserable failure” (within double quotes) in the google search box
3. Click one the the following buttons:

• Search button, and watch first link in the search results page.

Or

• I’m feeling lucky, button on the google.com page and see the result.

Dare you not burst into laughter? Yeah, that is the official page of Whitehouse, which shows you biography of George W. Bush.

Now look into the page a little technically, this page doesn’t have even the single occurrence of the word, failure. Now you should have started wondering, how is it possible?

This is possible and there are multiple past instances of the similar kind of event, termed, Google Bombing. In 1999, it was found that if you search google using keyword, “more evil than even satan himself”, and the page which used to appear as the topmost link in Google search result was that of Microsoft (www.microsoft.com)

Let’s look into the underlying secret. Your page can appear at the top of the google search results while searching on a specific keyword even if you don’t have even a single occurrence of that keyword in your page. This is possible with the links in your Web site, to the pages with high density of that particular keyword.

For further details, check out the link:
Filler Friday: Google Bombing